Ben Folds never lacks for unusual places from which to conduct phone interviews.

In the first of two interviews with Best Bets, Folds is in the bathroom of a Los Angeles Mexican restaurant next to the laundromat where he is undertaking the very un-rock star act of washing his own clothes.

“How do you get this f-----g thing to work?” Folds asks, confused about how to start the coin-operated dryer. “Don’t you think you’d press the button and it would just start?”

Yes, Ben folds his own laundry.

In the second interview, Folds is in Detroit, having just completed a show with the newly reunited trio Ben Folds Five, which makes a stop at Harrah’s Lake Tahoe Saturday night.

“I was just walking in the rain outside J.C. Penny with a bag of socks,” Folds says as if to underline exactly how unglamorous the life of a traveling musician can be.

But surely Folds gets to see some exciting locales in the course of his world tours, right?

“Not really,” he says. “We live in hotels and airports and vans and I literally travel a lot less than you guys.”

Still, the Tahoe tour stop — wedged tightly between dates in San Francisco and Seattle — gives Folds the opportunity to visit Northern Nevada for the first time in many years.

“I’ve played there, but it must have been a long time ago,” he says. “That’s one of the dry places. I just always remember it’s dry so you have to drink more water.”

The 47-year-old Folds founded the trio composed of himself, drummer Darren Jessee and bassist Robert Sledge in Chapel Hill, North Carolina in 1993 (and yes, BFF is a trio, not a quintet, hence the intended irony of the group’s name). The piano-heavy band steadily developed a following on the college indie scene, playing around the southeast before earning national attention with 1997’s “Whatever and Ever, Amen.”

That album spawned the radio hits “Battle of Who Could Care Less” and “Song For the Dumped.” It was with “Brick,” a track with lyrics about teenage abortion that the band found mainstream success. The song made an appearance on the Billboard Chart and was even more popular in Australia and the U.K. The band also enjoys a large and enthusiastic following in Japan.

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The band broke up in 2000, reuniting occasionally for one-off shows, but it wasn’t until 2011’s three-disc retrospective “Best Imitation of Myself” that the reunion began in earnest.

As to how the idea to reunite, record a new album and tour the world came about, Folds says cryptically, “It was just an evolution and it was just psychology. It takes a while to process things for human beings, and we do things by feel. It’s basically all we know.”

The end result is that BFF is solidly back together, touring 2012’s “The Sound of the Life of the Mind” to packed audiences across the U.S.

Looking back on the last 20 years, Folds still isn’t sure how much of his success has been luck and how much is due to persistence and sweat.

“There were certain things that were so much more calculated than people might think but you don’t really know who you are, how you’re affecting people,” he says.

Folds did start the band with a solid plan, though.

“I knew when I got the band together I was moving to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where there was an indie rock scene. I intended to find a bassist that played with distortion and a pick, a drummer and not have a guitar player. So I had an idea of what we could be.”

Moving around a real piano from gig to gig made him question his choices, but he never gave in.

“I was hoping we would make it before those things were taken away from us or before we got hurt or tired of moving the piano around, so there was calculation in that way because that was f-----g nuts to move that thing around,” he says.

Folds, who writes nearly all of his lyrics, says he often doesn’t understand what’s he’s really writing about until some time has passed.

“Genetically, I’m a writer and I’m doing things with the writing that I don’t always understand because that’s my biggest muscle,” he says. “I write something and then five, 10 years later I understand it. It’s actually realizing intuitively on some level what’s going on.

“I’m onstage playing the song “Bastard” and I think, ‘wow, this is a pretty brilliant chorus,’ because what insecurity leads to is people think they have to know everything. The chorus goes, ‘Why do you have to act like you know when you don’t know,’ and I have no idea why that’s the chorus. I was talking about a father or a grandfather leaving all his stuff in an attic and how you inherit all these things and then all of a sudden it jumps to ‘why do you have to know everything’ and the effect of these things.” he says. “It’s just low self-esteem. I didn’t understand these things when I wrote it, but some part of me did. My idiot self didn’t until I was older.”

Folds says he and the trio have enough songs to fill at least two more albums. And though he often used to joke that he’d never still be performing at this age, things change, Folds says.

“I think I’ve said in interviews that if by the time I’m 35 and I’m still making these f-----g records, shoot me, and now that’s ten years ago, so you just don’t know.”